There has been much development over the last thirty years in the field of hook-and-loop fasteners. Early touch fastener products of this type consisted of two mating tapes, each being knit or woven. One tape would include loops of filament woven into a base, and the other would include filaments woven to form loops and then cut to form hooks. In some cases free ends of drawn plastic filaments on the male tape would be melted to form protruding heads.
More recently, continuous molding of fastener elements extending from a common sheet-form resin base has resulted in less expensive and thinner male tapes. Significant improvements in this area include the development of continuous fastener tape molding using fixed mold cavities (see Fischer, U.S. Pat. No. 4,794,028), and the ability to provide loops on the back side of the male fastener tape as the fastener tape substrate and elements are being formed (see Kennedy et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,260,015), thus creating a composite fastener tape capable of fastening to itself.